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In the fall of 1986 I found myself at the Oakland Museum walking through a room of 19th-century landscape paintings, snug in their gilt frames. Drawn to the daylight from across the room, I glanced out the window overlooking the terraced sculpture garden. There, in the grass, I spied what looked like twin graves roiling with buried bodies (Figure 1). My first thought—there are dead bodies out there!—was closely followed by a second: an artist has brought death into the museum. That artist, Stephen De Staebler, is fond of paraphrasing Borges (1964): “An aesthetic experience is the intimation of a revelation that doesn't occur.”1 Yet for me, there had been a revelation: perhaps what made a work of art